Tag Archives: Centre for the Study of Media

In recent elections and in the EU referendum, concerns have been raised about the online targeting of voters on social media and the use of voter data. At a Constitution Unit seminar, Dr Martin Moore spoke about the shifting nature of online campaigning and examined its impact on the regulatory and legal landscape in the UK. In this blog post, Michela Palese summarises what he said.

Election campaigns have shifted significantly online in recent years. This reflects trends in news and media consumption. Nowadays, around 90% of British adults are online and 84% use social media, with approximately 30 million Britons using Facebook on a regular basis. Furthermore, around three quarters of internet users get their news online and four in ten use social media for news. It is therefore unsurprising that campaigning has shifted to the digital world, given the ease with which voters can be reached in a direct and highly personalised way.

Funding has shifted to digital as well. Campaigners admit that digital is where elections can be won and lost, and this is proven by the successful use they have made of social media. For example, Dominic Cummings stated that the Vote Leave campaign spent around 98% of its budget on digital campaigning. Jim Messina, a former political advisor to Barack Obama and founder of consulting firm The Messina Group, claimed that Facebook was ‘the crucial weapon’ in the Conservative Party’s successful general election campaign in 2015. In the last general election, by contrast, the Labour Party invested significant effort in social media advertising, with its videos being viewed by around ten million internet users.

At a Constitution Unit seminar, Dr Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication, and Power at King’s College London, argued that the changing nature of campaigning has highlighted some of the shortcomings in the UK’s regulatory and legal landscape. In particular, Moore noted the concerns which have been raised about the lack of fairness and openness in how campaigns are conducted online. Campaigners have, in fact, much more leeway in what they can do in the digital realm than on print or broadcast platforms. In 2017, both the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Electoral Commission opened investigations into how funds were spent during the EU referendum and into the manner in which voters were targeted on social media.Continue reading →

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